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MARY KRAMER: Adults need to put kids first in education

We're halfway through the school year, and too many adults are still exhibiting the most incredibly juvenile behavior.

Case in point: the continued assault against the Education Achievement Authority, the collection of the 15 worst-performing schools in Detroit carved out separately to try new methods and technology to help the most disadvantaged children make big gains in learning.

Late last year, Ann Arbor teachers announced they would not work with student teachers from EMU. Kind of the adult equivalent of when things don't go your way, you take your marbles and go home. Here's a lesson for future teachers attending EMU: Education is really a political game, and a hardball game at that. It's all about adults, not kids.

The EAA isn't perfect, its outgoing chair, Carol Goss, concedes. But in less than two years, it is showing promising gains in academic achievement. "It presents a huge opportunity to change results for kids," said Goss, the recently retired CEO of the Skillman Foundation.

In the beginning, about 11,000 students attended those 15 poor-performing schools. That shrank to about 9,000; some parents didn't like the "state takeover" aspect, some high school students didn't like a year-round school year, others don't like the EAA's structure (traditional grades 1-8 are replaced by achievement "levels" in specific subjects).

But because of the erosion from the original 11,000, rumors abound that the EAA is trying to recruit new students from the traditional city schools, which is not what was intended when Gov. Snyder signed on to support the authority.

Today, if you looked at education in Detroit like automakers think of selling cars, traditional Detroit Public Schools have 42 percent market share and the EAA has 7 percent. And charter schools now dominate at 51 percent. But not all charters are alike. Many are terrible — as bad as or worse than the traditional public schools. Check out the website excellentschoolsdetroit.org. Twelve of the 20 top-performing K-8 schools on its scorecard are traditional DPS schools.

It seems like there should be plenty of room to try new things because the majority of children in Detroit are at the bottom academically. What future can children have if they are ill-prepared for college or technical schools?